Ecommerce SEO Audit Checklist in 2022

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If you’re in the retail business you must be looking to rank higher on SERPs and increase sales. And to achieve this Search Engine Optimization is a critical necessity for eCommerce websites. An SEO best practice fulfills everything that your eCommerce website needs in order to get better online visibility and higher search rankings. An eCommerce SEO Audit is one of the crucial parts of your e-commerce SEO once you start optimizing your online store.

Because an SEO audit keeps your strategy up to date, creates a well-optimized website for search, and ensures no significant element is missing.

The audit is also important because Search Engine Optimization is a lot more involved in eCommerce businesses due to complex sites with thousands of product pages.

Also, Google algorithms constantly change, and auditing your site helps optimize it to maintain relevance with ever-changing algorithms.

What is an eCommerce SEO Audit?

eCommerce SEO audit is a good starting point in optimizing websites. It is a vital element of best SEO practices to evaluate the current performance and health of your site, as well as identify problems that are preventing you from ranking on Google.

The audit also improves your site’s organic visibility and identifies areas that need improvement.

• A typical audit looks at the current snapshot of your SEO standing
• Analyze how well your site performs across a range of ranking factors
• Make sure your site is being correctly crawled, indexed, and rendered by Google
• Check your website for on-page SEO problems
• Keep an eye on competitors’ actions

Ecommerce SEO Audit Checklist

The following checklist will make sure you are going in the right direction.

On-page SEO Checklist

On-page SEO strategies by the best eCommerce SEO companies help retailers rank higher, engage users, drive more traffic, and convert more leads. You need to check a few important on-page areas to confirm you’re getting the most from your SEO campaign.

Check Keyword Usage

Audit your page for core keywords and ensure they are used appropriately. Why? Because keywords trigger your pages to appear in relevant search results.

You can use a tool like Google Search Console to check page rankings and see which pages on your site are not ranking well.

• Keyword Usage: If your page doesn’t have main keywords, incorporate them. Place them in the product title tag as well as the product description.
• New Keywords: In case target keywords have already been used, make sure if there are other related keywords to target. Use Google Search Console to know what queries are driving people to your page to find new keywords.

Suggested URL – How to Do Keyword Research for An eCommerce Website?

Check Title Tags and Meta Descriptions

For better results from your search engine optimization service, evaluate your title tags and meta descriptions. Be sure they are compelling and can entice users to click on your listing.

Evaluate clicks for your listings using Google Search Console. Check the click-through rate (CTR) for your page and ensure whether or not your tags are generating enough interest to click.

A page ranking on the first page has a higher CTR in comparison to the page that is ranking on the second page.

• Re-optimize Title Tags and Meta Descriptions: In case of low CTR, optimizing meta tags is important to generate more clicks. It is advisable to make the description descriptive and use keywords.
• Reevaluation of Title and Meta: If the CTR is high but low conversions, make your title and descriptions relevant to the product page. Irrelevant ones cause users to click, but not buy.

Review On-page Content Strategy

Review your content and identify where improvement is required. Check the uniqueness, usefulness, accuracy, freshness, SEO–friendly structure of your content. Make sure the content contains valuable information such as products’ benefits and features along with primary keywords.

Take a look at the content strategy of your competitors and see what type of content they create.

• Find Keywords: Use tools like SEMRush to generate keyword ideas in seconds. Filter those ideas and focus on the most valuable ones. This practice will enable you to drive more traffic to your site.
• Produce More Content: If your content strategy has no noticeable holes, continue producing more content based on your persona and keywords. Use AnswerThePublic, Google Trends, BuzzSumo, Quora, etc. to find the most relevant and trendy topics.

E-A-T Content

E.A.T. means Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness. Google gives more importance to E-A-T when ranking web pages.

• Expertise: Have a skilled team that possesses subject-matter expertise in your field. Give it a priority as Google evaluates the author’s E-A-T. Expertise means delivering unique, useful, accurate, and fresh content that solves the audience’s queries.
• Authority: This is all about off-page SEO. All the external links you earn from industry peers, brand mentions, social shares, etc. contribute to building your authority in the field.
• Trustworthiness: Be transparent and provide a secure experience to customers. HTTPs, privacy policies, refund, and return policies, or contact details can contribute to building a trustworthy reputation.

Alternative Text

Search engine bots don’t read images. So, include an alt attribute to images. Include your target keyword in the alt text. If indeed, add value and describe what the image is about.

As part of your eCommerce SEO audit, make sure that all your images have relevant alt texts.

Off-Page SEO Checklist

Like on-page SEO, Off-page SEO also affects your site’s ranking. They are not directly performed on your own site. During website auditing, do analyze backlinks, and social profiles.

Check Backlinks

Backlinks are links from other websites to your site. If sites from where you have earned backlinks are authoritative, trustworthy websites, it improves your ranking and builds your trust and authority. Use Ahrefs backlink checker to know who’s linking to your content.

• Disavow bad links: Cancel or disavow links if you find bad backlinks on your profile.
• Earn More Backlinks: If you have good backlinks, use this as an opportunity to earn more backlinks. Reach out to companies with relevant content and invite them to link to your pages.

Analyze Your Social Profiles

Social media has an indirect impact on your search engine ranking. Sharing your website pages on social media gives a potential traffic boost and earns links. Check your social profiles and make sure you’re posting links to your content and product pages.

• Share links to your page: Create new blog posts, write product launch content or have special offers on your products, and share their links on social media platforms.
• Evaluate Performance: After sharing links, measure the performance of these links and evaluate which links are driving the most clicks to improve your strategy.

Technical SEO Checklist

Technical SEO for an e-commerce website determines how your site will perform and how search engines will find pages on your site. Don’t overlook its importance.

Check robots.txt

Robots.txt file tells Google which pages should be crawled and which not. Use it to tell search engines not to crawl pages, like shopping cart pages, wish lists, etc.

Create a robots.txt file for your site. If you already have one, check and ensure to set it correctly.

Check XML Sitemap

An XML sitemap lists important pages of your website. It directs Google to index all your critical pages, as well as helps understand your website structure.

• An XML sitemap helps search engines crawl and index URLs that are important for a website.
• If you have already created your sitemap, make sure it is up-to-date, error-free, and includes indexable, canonical versions of URLs.

Evaluate Indexability and Crawlability

Analyze the Indexability and Crawlability of your site. It is important because Google can’t index or crawl your site, and your online shop will not appear on the first page of search results. Use Google Search Console to see if Google can crawl and index your site.

• If the search engine is not indexing or crawling your pages, check your robots.txt file and internal links. Also, earn more backlinks to help crawlers discover your website.

Measure Site Speed

Fast page load speed is important for user experience. If your page doesn’t load fast, users will leave your site quickly and the bounce rate will increase. Make sure your site loads in 2 seconds.

• To improve site speed, compress large image files, reduce the number of redirects, minify CSS and JavaScript files, reduce the number of HTTP requests if possible, use browser HTTP caching, and minimize the inclusion of external scripts.

Check Mobile-Friendliness

Google uses mobile-first indexing, meaning it prioritizes the mobile-friendliness of your site when ranking it. So, ensure your site is mobile-friendly. You can do this by running Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test.

• Responsive Design Integration: Integrate responsive design to make your site mobile-friendly. Responsive design allows a site to fit any device a user uses.

Ensure Your Site Is Secure

Your audience inputs personal information and account/credit/debit card details to buy products from your company. You must ensure your eCommerce site is secure. Search engines favor secure sites because users feel comfortable browsing those pages.

• Type your URL and see whether your name has a closed lock next to it. If the lock is closed, it’s secure. Also, make sure your URL starts with “HTTPS” instead of “HTTP.” HTTPS means your site is secure.
• If your website is not secure, buy a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate.

Conclusion

Because of the significant role of website auditing, every SEO service provider adds it to their SEO plan of action. You should take into account every checklist.

Never underestimate the role of technical SEO for an e-commerce website. Never wrongly target your SEO keywords. Know the difference between transactional and informational queries, and target terms that will increase sales. And never use duplicate content on your website, as it massively decreases your site’s chances of ranking.

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